Mutsuko Kawamoto was born in Hiroshima, Japan. Her grandfather, a survivor of the atomic bomb attack, was a master of shigin, a traditional way of reciting Chinese and Japanese poems in Japanese. When Mutsuko was six years old, her family moved to White Plains, New York, and remained there for three years before returning to Hiroshima. During that time she attended public school in White Plains and became a bilingual speaker.

At Osaka University she studied foreign languages and earned a degree in linguistics. During her university days, she started singing in a university club band. In 2002, during a short stay for English studies in New York City, she visited the Village Vanguard, and there she discovered jazz. This experience changed her life, and she knew that she wanted to be a jazz singer! With this new passion, she launched a new career in 2004, singing jazz in Osaka.

After four years of performing, practicing, and gaining experience, Mutsuko took another big step, releasing her first album, “muz. quartet,” including original Japanese material. The album's release in 2008 marked a milestone in her jazz singing career. In 2012 she released another album, “Live at Mister Kelly’s,” recorded with guitarist Kazuhiko Takeda’s talented trio, and was chosen “Best Female Vocalist of 2012” by the J-Jazz website.

Mutsuko returned to Hiroshima in 2010. In an effort to share and promote her passion for jazz, she organized several jazz festivals, frequently performed around her hometown and across Japan, formed a vocal jazz group, and opened a vocal studio in Hiroshima.

In 2014 Mutsuko appeared at the French Quarter Festival in New Orleans. She formed a band, Noctiluca, and released the live album “Something Lost” in 2015. In the same year, she was certified as a voice teacher by New York Vocal Coaching, and the Osaka-based jazz magazine Way Out West cited her as one of Japan’s rising jazz vocalists. In September of 2016, she sang the national anthem at a Hiroshima Carp baseball game, shortly before they won their league championship. Her fourth album, “Decade,” was released via crowdfunding in 2021, celebrating her ten years back in Hiroshima.

In addition to her singing career, Mutsuko does voice training, teaches English pronunciation, and teaches private voice classes and a jazz vocal ensemble class at Hiroshima Bunka Gakuen University. Through years of practice and performance, Mutsuko has developed beautiful expression, natural pronunciation, great technique, and a sense of jazz.